I hope some of this information can be useful and that others can contribute to this. Things like this need automation to assist teachers to find applications and to keep the info up to date! A start is learning the package names and starting with this static page. Package metadata like the links should all be automated.

package name

student ages served

description & comments

rating from 1-10

tuxmath

ages 5-7

math, TuxMath is an excellent math game with entertaining graphics, sound and music that challenges students to score points by solving math problems under pressure. TuxMath is ideal for building math skills in students by repetition. Students are challenged to solve math equations which fall from the sky toward Tux the Penguin, who is sheltering below in his igloo. Students must solve the equation before the equation hits Tux's igloo, melting Tux's igloo, thereby exposing him to peril.

iTALC makes it possible, to access and influence the pupils activities just from the computer of the teacher. With the help of iTALC, for example the teacher is able to see the content of the pupils screens on his screen. If a pupil needs help, the teacher can access the pupils desktop and give support from his computer. The pupil can watch all activities, the teacher is doing on his desktop. So the pupil can learn new processes. For teaching something to all pupils, you can switch into demo-mode where all screens of the pupils show the teacher-screen. Furthermore things like locking pupil's screens, killing games, power on/off clients and much more can be done with iTALC.

smartbug

natural science, recommended by Ed Cherlin. It appears to be an app that creates a colony of bugs. The colony grows or dies depending on the ability of the bugs to adapt. The graphics seem at first blush to be rather crude, but that is base on only seeing a screenshot, not downloading the app. This app does not seem to be in the Ubuntu repositories. [...] This app can be found here: http://rupert.id.au/schoolgamemaker/samples3/ [...]

marble

grades 5-8

social science, Marble is an outstanding mapping program that allows a student to view the Earth and the Moon as interactive globes. Students can spin the Earth and the Moon, which are labeled with prominent features, such as lunar mares on the Moon or political boundaries on earth, such as national and state boundaries. Students can also zoom out to see the whole Earth or Moon at once, or zoom in to get regional detail such as major roadways in the San Francisco Bay Area. Marble offers 10 distinct maps of the Earth: the Atlas view (showing mountains, valleys, rivers, and political boundaries; the Open Street Map (containing real-time information created Wikipedia-style by the Open Street Map community); Satellite view (based on a composite of NASA images similar to Google but with somewhat less detail); Earth at night (showing Earth lighted at night in NASA pictures); an historical map from 1689, showing humans knowledge of the earth as of that date; a plain map, showing only political boundaries and continent outlines; as well as four distinct maps showing temperatures and precipitation for December and July.

kgeography

grades 5-6

social science, kgeography provides maps of all the nations of Earth, listing the capitols of the nation and basic facts about the nations. Same for all of the US states. Students are given the chance to drag nations and states into their proper places on the map and are graded on their performance. The graphics are okay, but not great. Still, it might be useful for a 5th or 6th grade class.

The edubuntu project has a website (not fully updated since 8.10) with sets of packages designed for different age groups. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/edubuntu-meta/ This is a source package for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx to be released in 2010 April, but downloading it I see the packages are actually named:

ubuntu-edu-preschool

ubuntu-edu-primary

ubuntu-edu-secondary

ubuntu-edu-tertiary

Using a command "apt-cache show <name>" with the above names (this could/should be automated. I manually removed some duplicates within and between packages) I get the following: